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Academic Freedom or Shrill Partisanship?

Gene Nichol, a UNC Law School professor, goes over the top in his invective.

By Francis X. DeLuca and Jane S. Shaw

(Editor’s note: This article is being simultaneously posted on the Civitas Institute and the Pope Center for Higher Education websites. On October 21 it was updated with a note about Nichol’s wife’s salary.)

In 2011, President Obama called for a more civil discourse to “make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” Unfortunately, Gene Nichol, Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor—and former dean—at UNC-Chapel Hill’s law school, appears to have no interest in adhering to that advice.

Nichol writes a regular column for the Raleigh News and Observer. On such subjects as hunger, unemployment, etc., his articles are predictably to the left and sometimes approach a screed or rant. “We’re engaged in a breathless competition to produce the most extreme government in America,” is a fairly typical statement. Or, “Havoc nears. The result will be unlike anything we’ve seen in more than three decades. ”

But Nichol outdid himself earlier this week. In an attack on North Carolina governor Pat McCrory published on Monday Oct. 14, Nichol called North Carolina’s new voter ID and election reform law the “most oppressive in the nation. ” Furthermore, McCrory’s support for the act in the face of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s suit against it makes McCrory “a 21st century successor to Maddox, Wallace and Faubus.”

For those who are unfamiliar with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, those three were Democratic segregationist governors who made national publicity, to the shame of their states. Lester Maddox became famous in 1964 for keeping three African-Americans out of his Atlanta restaurant, with axe handle in the air. He was elected governor of Georgia two years later. In 1963, George Wallace stood in front of the University of Alabama in an unsuccessful effort to block black students from entering. Orville Faubus was an Arkansas governor who tried in 1957 to stop black students from entering Little Rock Central High School—until President Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock.

It’s hard to imagine a more vicious and false comparison for McCrory.

Nichol went on, referring to the state of North Carolina: “We now constitute the leading edge of Southern civil rights oppression.” Calling the state a vanguard of “civil rights oppression” is a fantastic accusation, one without foundation. Every major provision in the election reform law merely puts North Carolina on par with the majority of other states, and in some respects our election laws continue to be less restrictive than liberal northern states like New York.

Nichol simply detaches himself from reality with such wild accusations.

A nasty attack of this sort on a governor might be ignored if Gene Nichol were a fringe figure. But he is not. He is a law professor who receives $205,400 per year from North Carolina taxpayers. He is also director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, the UNC center founded in 2005 by former senator (and subsequently disgraced) John Edwards. He was dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill law school from 1999 to 2005, before a short stint as president of the College of William and Mary. He was also dean of the University of Colorado Law School from 1988 to 1995.

Nichol’s nastiness and increasingly unhinged partisanship—legally allowable but an embarrassment to the university of which he is a part—reflects an arrogance and radicalism that have been building for years.

Nichol courts controversy. He was fired from William and Mary in 2008 (the trustees declined to renew his contract and he abruptly quit) primarily for two acts that reflected his politics and his disdain for traditions. One was his decision to remove a historic cross from the Wren Chapel, a chapel used for religious services but also for secular events—because he didn’t want to subject secular students to such a sight. The second was his willingness to allow a crude and explicit performance of the Sex Workers’ Art Show (which the Pope Center’s Jay Schalin brought to public attention).

But, as Schalin wrote later, the Democratic establishment at UNC was quick to bring Nichol home. Indeed, he and his wife, Glenn George, were promised jobs within weeks of his resignation,even though the jobs were never advertised and there was no indication that any such jobs were needed, and normal hiring procedures were short-circuited. Nichol received a salary of $200,000 at the time and George received $168,000 in 2009. Each of them was to teach one class a semester. (Editor’s note: George is now chief of staff for the UNC Health Care System and the UNC School of Medicine and is paid $407,410 per year.)

Jack Bolger, dean of the law school, made the offers. He had been on the faculty when Nichol was dean, and succeeded him. In addition to the soft landing for him and his wife, Nichol was named director of the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the law school.

Although the legislature stopped public funding of the Center in 2010, it received nearly a million dollars in taxpayer funds from 2005 to 2008. The Poverty Center at UNC has avoided revealing details about its current funding, even though it is required by law to do so. In 2011, in response to a Civitas Institute public records request, a representative of the UNC Law School [b1] said that because the “Center’s programs and staff are funded entirely by private funds, its activities and associated work products do not fall under the jurisdiction of Chapter 132 of the North Carolina General Statutes.”

This is actually untrue. Chapter 132 is the North Carolina public records law. The law states that it covers documents relating to “transaction of public business by any agency of North Carolina government or its subdivisions.” As Clark Riemer of Civitas has pointed out, there is no exception in the law based on the source of funding.

Because the center is funded by private dollars, its officials falsely claim that it does not have to provide financial documents. However, it does not file an IRS Form 990, as all nonprofits are required to do, on the grounds that the center is part of the public UNC system. Thus, the center claims to be both private and public, depending on whom they are trying to conceal information from. (While the center ultimately turned over some documents to Civitas, it never released requested information about its fundraising and budget).

The Poverty Center claims that it is a “non-partisan” institute,yet the center and its director violate the spirit of that requirement. Nichol’s latest article is just the most recent example. Indeed, when state legislative control turned Republican in 2010, Nichol’s approach became decidedly more partisan (not to mention shrill). He even revamped a conference after the election of 2010.

Nichol said in an email that he had initially planned a conference “to explore a wide array of public and non-profit practices and ventures which have proven effective in fighting poverty and wealth disparity. But, frankly, given the altered circumstance in Raleigh and Washington, it has now seemed more important, or essential, to change directions.” Thus, the conference would take the form of “a large set of discussions, in mid-spring, to explore and develop and press an agenda for working people at a time of exigency in Carolina.“

In short, the center scrapped a conference on measures that at least proposed to aim at fighting poverty and instead planned a partisan rally against the new GOP majority. No conservative academics or legislators were invited to be on any of the panels. Instead, Nichol invited Z. Smith Reynolds and other Blueprint NC cohorts like NC Policy Watch, the NAACP and the NC Justice Center. Readers should recall that Blueprint NC was notoriously exposed through a leaked strategy memo that implored member organizations to “eviscerate” and “cripple” GOP leaders. Nichol continues to serve on the Board of Directors for the NC Justice Center, which ties him directly in with the Blueprint eviscerate network.

Nichol didn’t just write invective; he spoke it, as he did in 2011 at an event hosted by a Democratic women’s group. A blogger, Michael Carmichael, described his performance as: a “riveting Jeremiad rippling with penetrating punchlines orchestrated against a leitmotif of bitterly incisive invective skewering the Republican radicalism now infecting the American electorate.”

Disappointingly, yet all too typical of Nichol, his “penetrating punchlines” amounted to little more than name-calling and clichéd fear mongering using well-worn out left-wing bogeymen.

“A politics of the Koch brothers, and Art Pope, and Wall Street, and John Roberts, and Nino Scalia, and Citizens United, and the Chamber of Commerce, and Bank of America—the malefactors of great wealth. Say, we’re not going to have it—whether we’ll occupy not only Wall Street, but—America.”

When reading Nichol’s diatribes, readers should consider the source. Nichol is a radical partisan who has desperately ratcheted up his rhetoric after seeing his preferred party lose control in North Carolina for the first time in more than a hundred years. Perhaps more disturbing is Nichol’s abuse of his stature at UNC-Chapel Hill to propagate his invective.

If President Obama andleft-wing progressives want to see a more civil tone in public debate, they should start by addressing the rhetoric of Gene Nichol.

Francis X. DeLuca is President of the Civitas Institute and Jane S. Shaw is President of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy

Reader Interactions

Discussion

What’s interesting here is the advocates for injustice at Civitas Institute find any organization teaching humanity, compassion or that voice opposition to a Plutocracy form of government in North Carolina get labeled as patrician. We seen police state tactic being advocated by Civitas Institute and being executed by the Republican Controlled NCGA in the arrest of over 900 citizens will to stand in opposition to the extremist Banana Republic form of government on the Art Pope agenda.

LW’s comment is laughable. The left wing is humane, compassionate, and empathetic in name only. They continue to destroy free market systems in the name of “fairness”, provide the means to subsist without paying taxes, push progressive liberal ideology in public policy and schools, and continue to create a thought police in the name of “political correctness.” BTW, “police states” take away individual liberty for the “common good”, the hallmark of the progressive movement.

You folks at Civitas Institute don’t advocate for free markets but rather a Plutocracy where the very wealthy like Art Pope have control of the government and making government work for his personal gain not the good of general public. I remind you the countries with the highest standards of living are in free market economies with very strong social safety nets. Your Plutocracy form of government was instituted in Augusto Pinochet’s government of Chile leading to death squads. It can also be found in third world countries around the world were the very rich live behind secured wall with armed guards, private police and body guards for themselves and their children, but their taxes are low.

Lonnie… come on. You lose a bit of credibility if you call the Moral Monday arrests “police state tactic” [sic]. The protestors knew they were breaking the law, were warned beforehand, divided themselves according to who wanted to be arrested, and no physical force was used in their arrest.

Andrew, the right wing extremist here at Civitas Institute have called for a more heavy handed police enforcement of the Moral Monday decent and harsher punishment for those wanting to be heard by the NCGA purchased by Art Pope in his quest for a Plutocracy form of government in North Carolina under his personal control. Any voice raised in opposition the extreme unjust laws passed by the recent NCGA have been labeled partisan.

Can anyone doubt that this is an attempt to intimidate Gene Nichols? He is not spending taxpayers dollars; the beef seems to be that, as a University professor, he has declined to be a political eunuch. Or, more accurately, has taken positions that the Pope foundation–excuse me, the “Civitas” foundation– finds offensive. Among other things, Mr. DeLuca seems most upset about the comparison that Nichols makes between Pat McCrory and earlier segregationist governors Lester Maddox, George Wallace and Orval Faubus. It is certainly true McCrory is no segregationist–that is now part of our past. But, as a biographer of George Wallace, I don’t find the comparison far-fetched at all as long as you compare them in their different contexts. McCrory, like the three governors before him, has set out to try and minimize the votes of the African-Americans, and indeed of anyone who is impoverished and vulnerable. The fact that he does so while uttering pious platitudes claiming to be above racial politics only adds hypocrisy to his assault on the most basic right in our democracy.

[…] heads of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and the Civitas Institute responded with their own piece, saying Nichol’s “nastiness and increasingly unhinged partisanship … reflects an arrogance […]

[…] Looking to cut $15 million from a budget, the UNC centers are often times duplicative or highly politically partisan in nature. The working group has now whittled their list down to 34 centers that have been moved to the final […]

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